Some internees were locked up until 1920, nearly two years after the First World War ended

Wartime hysteria and a slumping economy stoked the fires of xenophobia that had been smouldering on the home front for years, and the streets of Edmonton were no longer a safe haven for many legal immigrants.

Katie Domytryk’s father was one of those so-called “enemy aliens” who were placed in the government crosshairs when the War Measures Act was invoked on Aug. 22, 1914, just 18 days after Canada entered the First World War.

He was arrested in Edmonton, jailed in Lethbridge and transferred to an internment camp in Spirit Lake, Que., one of 24 such facilities across Canada that imprisoned 8,579 men, women and children. His nine-year-old daughter wrote him a heartbreaking letter.

“My dear father: We haven’t nothing to eat and they do not want to give us no wood. My mother has to go four times to get something to eat. It is better with you, because we had everything to eat. This shack is no good, my mother is going down town every day and I have to go with her and I don’t go to school at winter. It is cold in that shack. We your small children kiss your hands my dear father. Goodbye my dear father. Come home right away.”

A country that had opened its arms to homesteaders from Eastern Europe quite suddenly closed its mind as war broke out. Most internees were single, poor, unemployed Ukrainian men, but they had the company of Bulgarians, Croatians, Germans, Hungarians, Italians, Poles, Serbians, Turks, Romanians and Russians. Maj.-Gen. Sir William Dillon Otter, who oversaw the internment program, reported that 3,138 internees were legitimate prisoners of war. Another 5,441 were unquestionably civilians, including 156 children and 81 women held in Vernon, B.C., and Spirit Lake.

“It personally bothers me. Ukrainians had a rough time of it when they got to Canada,” said UBC Okanagan professor Lisa Grekul, a Ukrainian-Canadian from St. Paul, Alta. “What they were promised and what actually transpired here was very different.

“The internment throws into sharp relief the glaring differences between the aggressive recruitment drive to get these stalwart, good farmers, stoic peasant folk to settle the West, and what they were greeted with, which was: ‘We want you to break the land and settle the West, but we don’t want you to be what you are.’

“‘Your religion is weird, you’ve got weird superstitions, you smell like garlic, you wear sheepskin coats. You better drop the language and assimilate as quick as possible because you’re threatening.’

“What a ripoff it was for immigrants who were seduced by the agenda of the government.”

Through orders in council, the government of prime minister Robert Borden suddenly had powers of media censorship, arrest without charge, deportation without trial, and the expropriation, control and disposal of property. The orders also immediately compelled more than 80,000 “enemy aliens” to report regularly to authorities. Those who ran afoul of the new regulations, or were simply found to be indigent, were rounded up by police.

“There is no evidence that any of them committed any acts of disloyalty and yet because of the climate of the times, wartime hysteria and domestic crisis, they found themselves rounded up and herded into these internment camps, where they were forced to do labour for the profit of their jailers,” said Lubomyr Luciuk, who has written extensively on the topic.

Some aliens lied about their backgrounds, were accepted into the Canadian Expeditionary Force and served with distinction. One of them, Ukrainian Filip Konowal, earned the Victoria Cross, the Empire’s highest award for valour. In a two-day period in August 1917, he killed 16 enemy soldiers during the Battle of Hill 70.

At home, male internees were forced into hard labour — in Jasper and Banff they cleared thick forest for roadways. They faced deplorable, crowded living conditions that bred tuberculosis and pneumonia. A total of 107 prisoners died, the bulk from TB, some from suicide. Six were shot and killed trying to escape.

Internees at the Kapuskasing camp.Archive photo,

“In those days, these were the back ends of nowhere,” Luciuk said of Banff and Jasper. “Parks Canada at the time was having a lot of trouble developing them because it was very expensive. So the parks superintendent came up with a great idea — we’ve got all these young bucks sitting around doing nothing, we can use them. Now, they shouldn’t have been doing that, because all the various conventions prohibit using prisoners of war for military purposes or the purposes of the government interning them, but they did it anyway.”

In 2013, Parks Canada acknowledged the internment, but critics say the tribute in Banff falls well short of adequate, given the harm inflicted.

“Parks Canada, they’ve always been reluctant to recognize this and they certainly are reluctant to portray the more brutal aspects of it because people did die trying to escape,” said Luciuk. “People did suffer injuries, people were separated from their families, communities and friends, in some cases for years at a time, people suffered all sorts of disabilities as a result of this.”

By 1916, some internees were paroled to work for private companies that had run short of labourers due to an exodus of soldiers overseas.

“So there is a contradiction here,” said Grekul. “Are they planning to threaten Canada’s part in the war effort? Are they so threatening you need to put them behind bars? Apparently not, because in 1916 lots of them were put out to work wherever work was needed.”

While the fighting stopped with the armistice on Nov. 11, 1918, some internees were kept behind barbed wire until well into 1920, such was the value of their continued forced labour to a depressed Canadian economy.

When they were finally released, some internees claimed their personal possessions had been stolen.

“These were not by and large wealthy people. But they clearly did lose some valuables,” said Luciuk. “There are people who report their watch was taken, whatever money they had was taken.”

It was yet another indignity and Luciuk was among those whose efforts ensured it will not go unnoticed. Passed in 2005, Bill C-331 obliged the federal government to produce formal recognition of the internment of Ukrainians. In 2008, a $10-million fund was established to bankroll such efforts.

The demand for an acknowledgment rather than a financial settlement was proposed most eloquently by former internee Mary Manko, who died in 2007.

“She set the tone,” said Luciuk. “She said your campaign should be about memory, not money.”

Luciuk has also spearheaded a campaign to place 100 plaques of acknowledgment across Canada, including six in Edmonton. They will be unveiled at 11 a.m. local time on Aug. 22 in all 100 locations, a century after the War Measures Act was invoked and the wheels of internment were set in motion.

Lively discourse is the lifeblood of any healthy democracy and Postmedia encourages readers to engage in robust debates about our stories. But, please, avoid personal attacks and keep your comments respectful and relevant. If you encounter abusive comments, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. This site is using Facebook Comments. Visit our FAQ page for more information.